Heckler's Veto
by Mad Maudlin
Summary: Neville arranges to have some time alone with Luna. Things don't go quite as planned.


Heckler's Veto

by Mad Maudlin

The day was cloudy and cool, with a stiff breeze sweeping down the side of the mountain as if to cut through the very stones of the castle. At the stub-end of autumn it was still too warm for snow, but only just. Neville burrowed his face into his scarf and squinted though the foggy glass of the greenhouse. "I think it's empty now," he said, "if you still want to have a look."

"Oh, yes, please," Luna said. She had enormous fluffy pink earmuffs on, but no scarf, and her face was growing red after just a few minutes walking through the wind. They had little choice but to defy the weather: with security around the school tighter than ever, students were rarely allowed to make even this simple walk to the greenhouses without an escort, and if they didn't go today it would be another week before they got another chance. Neville wanted to see this; more than that, he wanted Luna to see it, and he wanted to be the one to show her. It had to be now, or never.

"It'll probably be boring," he warned her as they scurried across the grounds. "I mean, we might be too early, and nothing will happen." (_With the plant,_ he added in his mind; but all sorts of other things could happen in an empty greenhouse that had nothing to do with plants.)

Luna flashed him a brilliant smile. "I have a good feeling about it," she said, and Neville felt a pleasant sort of flutter in the pit of his stomach. "I saw three Rengilits this morning before breakfast, that's supposed to be lucky."

"Oh," Neville said, and started fumbling with the latch on the greenhouse door. "That's good. Really good."

"Yes, they're frightfully hard to catch."

He wasn't sure how he had ended up spending so much time with Luna this term; well, he sort of did, but not really. Hogwarts had reopened with a shadow of the former student body, as younger children were held back by their parents and older ones withdrew to join the fight. Of ten Gryffindors in Neville's year, five had actually returned, and four now remained—Lavender had withdrawn after her grandmother was murdered by Death Eaters, just weeks into the term. Dean was the only other boy left, as Seamus' mother had held him back and Harry and Ron were...wherever, and while Dean was certainly a nice enough fellow, he and Neville had never been particularly friendly before, and nothing had really changed except the number of beds in the dormitory.

Neville had never been particularly friendly with Luna before, either, though; to be honest, she had always rather alarmed him. But the pall of war and the new security rules around the school made the common room a tense, gloomy place, dominated by Ginny's grim-faced attempts to revive a semblance of Dumbledore's Army. Luna was probably the only person in all Hogwarts who didn't seem to have let the chaos and violence outside dampen her spirits or weigh on her mind. To the casual observer, she was oblivious to it all; at first, when Neville began to spend time with her, he thought she just didn't care about it.

"Do you need help?" she asked as he continued to fiddle with the door.

"No, I've almost—got it." The latch finally gave way, and the knob turned freely. "C'mon, they'll expect us at lunch soon."

It had taken Neville a while to understand that Luna did care, just as much as the rest of them cared. She just had a slightly different perspective on the matter.

The greenhouse was comfortably humid inside, and Neville immediately shucked his scarf and cloak; Luna hesitated to part with her earmuffs, but eventually tucked them away in her pocket, revealing earrings in the shape of mice that dangled from her lobes by their tails. This was where Neville, as one of the only Herbology NEWT students who had remained, occasionally met with Professor Sprout to observe and discuss some of the more exotic specimens that would be covered on the exam. There were a few new ones on the tables, but the stout red pot he had brought Luna to see was still exactly where it had been the week before last, dominating the clutter of pots and tool around it. "Over here," he said, pushing aside a tray of what looked like thin, pale asparagus that swayed gently in the still air. "This is it, the one I was telling you about. The Fiery Eggcorn."

Luna approached the pot carefully and bent over to examine the contents: a load of rocky, sandy soil, a few feeble tendrils of leaves, and in the center, a single leathery pod that resembled nothing more than a large, malformed avocado. Luna said, "Oh."

"It's a desert plant," Neville said; he hoped he wasn't rambling too badly. "That's why it's...well...like that. It's got to conserve moisture."

"What's inside?" Luna asked, making to prod the pod with her finger.

"Don't touch it," Neville said quickly, and he almost grabber her wrist before he realized that he'd be _grabbing her wrist,_ oh god. "It's, er, delicate. Because inside there is the whole rest of the plant, the flowers and all, and it only blooms—"

"Once every ten years," Luna completed. "You told me when you asked if I wanted to see it."

"Er." Neville said. "Right. Sorry."

Somebody snickered.

It had to be Luna, of course, because she was the only other person in the greenhouse, and it made Neville blush to the roots of his hair. During the term, as they had become better friends, he had come to appreciate Luna's absolutely earnest interest in just about everything. She could listen intently for hours on any topic, from politics to charm theory to belly button lint. She sometimes contributed to the discussion in an unpredictable fashion, but Neville had come to feel more comfortable talking to her than to anyone else he knew, without fear of mockery or insult.

So if he was being a big enough prat that even Luna was laughing at him...well. This obviously wasn't going according to plan.

Luna peered closely at the Eggcorn, without, however, attempting to touch it again. Neville hadn't seen it for several days, as Professor Sprout had taken to holding lectures in her office when they weren't working directly with the plants. The pod had swollen since he'd examined it last, and he could clearly make out seams where it was going to split open. He cleared his throat and pointed these out to Luna. "It shouldn't be long now. I mean, Professor Sprout said it would be today or tomorrow, probably."

"How long does the bloom last?" Luna asked.

"Only a few days," Neville said. "Then it has to spend another ten years saving up food and water in its roots before it can bloom again."

Luna blinked at it, then smiled broadly. "How impractical!"

Neville smiled nervously, feeling his chest swell with pleasure. That was one of the most amazing things about Luna, one of the things that too few people seemed to understand. She had a great sense for beauty and wonder in the world, whether it was to be found in an impractical flower or a carnivorous horse or a monster no one else had ever seen. She could find something amazing in even ordinary things, and—this was crucial, the part no one but Neville seemed to get—it wasn't that Luna didn't care about things that were ugly or frightening or bad, not at all. She just kept them in her own unique perspective. _"If there weren't any Death Eaters or Dark Lords,"_ she had once told Neville, _"how could we appreciate the flight of a Perfidious Harshurfle?"_

Neville didn't know that Harshufles flew, or even what they were, but he had understood the sentiment, and suddenly Luna's unflappable calm made much more sense. Perhaps that was why he wanted so badly to show her the Eggcorn, though it was unlikely to bloom in the few minutes they had to spare here. He knew she would appreciate the idea of the flower without having to see it, and for a little while he could share a bit of her serenity, while they were alone together in the silent, humid greenhouse. And perhaps, if he was very lucky, that wasn't all they would share...

Somebody giggled, again.

Luna looked at Neville and blinked, frowning a bit. "That wasn't very nice," she said.

"What?" Neville looked around. "That wasn't me."

"It wasn't?"

"No." He walked down the aisle and looked around, but the greenhouse looked genuinely empty; the asparagus-things next to the Eggcorn were the only things moving besides Luna and himself. He peeked under a potting bench, but no, nothing under there but large pots and sacks of dragon dung. "That's really strange."

"Perhaps there's an infestation of Ginderfricks," Luna said hesitantly.

Neville shrugged, because it sounded as good as anything else. "Maybe."

The giggling happened again, louder.

Luna's frown deepened, and she stepped away from the Eggcorn. "It's getting close to lunchtime," she said a bit stiffly. "Perhaps we ought to go."

"No! I mean, no, not yet—" Neville blurted, looking around wildly for the source of the noise. There were no shadows on the foggy panes of glass, meaning no one outside. "That wasn't—I mean, I wasn't laughing at you. I wasn't even laughing. That wasn't me."

"You don't have to lie to me, you know," Luna said, with a hurt expression Neville had never seen on her before.

"I'm not lying!" he said, thinking wildly. "Maybe—maybe Peeves is in here. Oi, Peeves! Out of here!"

"Peeves never leaves the castle," Luna said gently.

Neville licked his lips. "So—so it must be Gingersfips. Gingerflicks. Ginderflaps."

"Ginderfricks," she corrected.

Someone laughed _again._

"Luna, _wait—"_ Neville grabbed at her sleeve to keep her from stepping away again. "I'm not laughing at you. See? I'm not even smiling. It must—there's got to be—I don't who it is but somebody else in here laughing at us and we just can't see them!"

Luna blinked at him, and said, "Neville, that's not terribly plausible, is it?"

He cringed. She—or someone, at least—giggled at him.

"I'm sorry," he said, backing away. "I'm sorry, I just—I wanted to show you, because I thought you'd like it, and I thought maybe while we were out here we could, er..." _don't say snog, don't say snog, don't say snog, _"...talk?"

"We can talk in the castle, too," Luna said.

Neville swallowed. "Well, yeah..."

"Unless you were afraid of being overheard by a cat?"

"A...cat?"

Luna nodded. "They're not at all trustworthy."

And there was more of the bloody _laughing!_

Neville swore and spun around, looking for anything that could possibly the source, any lurking observers or poltergeists or gingersnaps. Luna sighed, and straightened up a bit. "I think I had better go now," she said.

"No—Luna, please believe me—"

"If you only brought me out here to laugh at me," she added with a bit of a pout, "I wish you would've told me so. I would've worn different earrings."

She turned and started to walk away, and Neville buried his face in his hands, unable to understand how things had gone so badly so fast. He heard a faint giggle, but it was impossible to figure out where it was coming from the rattle and groan of the wind outside and Luna's footsteps and the rustling sound of the swaying asparagus, and the loud pop of the Eggcorn—

Wait a minute, pop?

Neville dared to uncover his eyes, and blinked. The Eggcorn pod had erupted into a spray of delicate, jointed stems, each joint nestled in a whorl of waxy leaves, each stem tipped with a cluster of huge orchid-like flowers in shimmering shades of orange and yellow and gold. For a moment Neville was struck speechless, but then—"Luna! Luna, look, look at the Eggcorn—!"

A gale of snorting laughter floated through the greenhouse, and Luna's footsteps paused only a moment before the greenhouse door clicked shut.

Sighing, Neville stared at the beautiful flowers for a moment longer; he knew they wouldn't last long enough for him to get Luna back here to see them, at least not without a teacher as an escort, and honestly, what was the point of that? He started putting the contents of the bench back as he had found them, berating himself for getting his hopes up even as he thought furiously about who, or what, could possibly be the source of that obnoxious laughter. He laid his hand on the tray of pale asparagus, and his thumb brushed carelessly against one of the hard leaves that guarded the base of a stalk.

It giggled.

Neville stared, then quickly turned the tray around and examined the label on the front of the tray, squinting to make out Professor Sprout's careless penmanship:

_Laughing Stalks._

_"Luna!_ Luna, wait—!"


End file.
